Bibliographic record
Abstract
Augie Fleras. The Media Gaze: Representations of Diversities in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. 300 pp. References. Index. $32.95 sc. Positioned at the junction of two of today's inescapable realities--media saturation and diversity in our society--Augie Fleras' new book, The Media Gaze, explores the representation of diversities and in Canadian media. The book challenges the notion of neutrality--the idea that are conveyors of objective information--and aims to explore the logic and dynamics of representation of race, ethnicity, aboriginality, gender, sexuality, class, age, and religion. To the author, such an understanding is important as are our primary source of information in this media-saturated world we live in, and thereby shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Especially, in the absence of meaningful first-hand contact with diversities and difference (3), our perspective on the other is largely constructed by messages. The book is organized into 14 chapters within four parts. Part I provides theoretical framework for the book by deconstructing and defining the concept of the gaze. Part II explores as conveyors of socially constructed discourses through various types of gaze, with case studies of the mis-representational process following in Part III. Finally, as response to mainstream representation (Parts II and III), Part IV introduces the oppositional gaze from social/online and populist media, that is, media by, for, and about those demographics that public and private mainstream tend to ignore or distort (7). The author argues that consistent with mainstream institutions in general, the institutional principles and priorities of mainstream embrace dominant ideologies that define what is normal, acceptable, or desirable (3). Mainstream project mediated social reality through the gaze, defined as a tendency to impose specific view of the world without announcing its intention or underlying biases (37). Various gazes that derive from different ideological dimensions or combination of these dimensions (corporate, racialized, Eurocentric, gendered or androcentric, classed, ageist, and secular) and processes (newscasting, advertising, film, etcetera) are identified and analyzed. The author argues that through these gazes, mainstream construct mediacentric images in which marginalized demographics are continually underrepresented in areas that count, overrepresented in areas that don't count, and misrepresented on both accounts (4). Evidence of improvement in representation of racial minorities in news (Chapter 8), women in advertising (Chapter 9) and working-class men in sitcoms (Chapter 10), for example, are not absent. However, such changes are not transformative enough to challenge the status quo (media's foundational principles) but rather reinforce it. Thus, the underlying messages are consistent with those of the past: marginalized demographics are troublesome constituents (viii). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".